Google’s Summer of Code

Google is running a program designed to introduce students to open source development:

This Summer, don’t let your programming skills lie fallow…Use them for the greater good of Open Source Software and computer science! Google will provide a $4500 award to each student who successfully completes an open source project by the end of the Summer. (payment details can be found in FAQ)

By pairing applicants up with the proven wisdom and experience of established prominent open source organizations (listed below), we hope to make great software happen. If you can’t come up with a great idea to submit, a number of our organizations have made idea lists available.

That’s a great idea, and I applaud Google for doing it. What really impressed me, though, is the way they launched the program. There was no press release, no big media announcement–they just had an employee (and blogger) announce it on Slashdot with an informal posting. Presumably, if the article hadn’t been picked up on the site, they would have gone down a more traditional media relations route.